Wait! There's More!

Yesterday I wrote about what ICE is doing to children in Minneapolis, but there is far more happening across the country.

ICE is building a surveillance network rivaling those of North Korea, China, and Russia.

The powerful tools in ICE’s arsenal to track suspects — and protesters

Biometric trackers, cellphone location databases and drones are among the surveillance technologies that federal agents are tapping in their deportation campaign.

The Washington Post

By Eva Dou, Artur Galocha and Kevin Schaul

January 29, 2026

Federal immigration officers fanning out across Minnesota and other parts of the country are newly equipped with an array of state-of-the-art surveillance technologies, thanks to a bill passed last summer that transformed Immigration and Customs Enforcement into the country’s most highly funded law enforcement agency. ICE has wasted no time spending its war chest, buying new tools ranging from biometric trackers to mobile phone location databases, spyware and drones, while loosening restrictions on how it uses some of these technologies.

These new surveillance powers come at a time when ICE is also pushing the bounds of its traditional role of immigration enforcement. In recent months, ICE leaders, backed by top Trump administration officials, have asserted the authority to use all available tools to monitor and investigate anti-ICE protester networks, including U.S. citizens. Democratic lawmakers and civil rights groups say the agency’s expanding use of its surveillance tools infringes on privacy and free speech rights of immigrants and U.S. citizens alike.

Big Brother is watching you—checking to see if you are naughty or nice!

ICE started using facial recognition technology on the streets over the past year. A new app made by NEC, Mobile Fortify, enables ICE officers to immediately compare phone scans of faces and fingerprints they encounter in the field against databases containing individuals’ immigration status and other biographical information. In the fall, ICE purchased an iris-scanning mobile app that its manufacturer, BI2 Technologies, says can get an identifying read on a person’s eye within seconds from a distance of 15 inches.

“There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment.” George Orwell 1984.

ICE ordered mobile license plate readers from Motorola Solutions in the fall and renewed a contract for Thomson Reuters’s database, which boasts more than 20 billion plate scans, including from private surveillance video feeds. Thomson Reuters has said this data can show, for instance, when an individual registered at one address regularly parks his or her car at another location.

The ACLU reported that Flock is sharing their data with ICE!

There’s been more news recently about the driver-surveillance company Flock. The company has recently been feeling the heat after the revelation that data from its national license plate scanner network was (and likely still is being) shared with Trump Administration agencies including ICE. Recently my colleagues at the ACLU of Massachusetts carried out a broad statewide open-records project, and among their findings is that Flock’s default agreement with police departments gives the company the right to share data with federal and local agencies for “investigative purposes” even if a local department chooses to restrict data to its own officers.

Even in states that bar the distribution of data from speed and red light camera... they are just ignoring the state laws!  That is the scary part, DHS is building a database of "troublemakers" those who are using their Constitutional rights are being monitored by ICE!

Cell-site simulators, also called Stingrays, masquerade as cell towers and trick nearby cellphones to connect, allowing ICE officers to track a phone’s location in real time. The devices, often mounted atop vehicles, are used in two ways. If officers already know the identifying number of the target phone, they can use the cell-site simulator to look for it. They also can scan for all cellphones in the area.

Pro tip: If you are protesting, set your phone to Airplane Mode. This stops location broadcasting while still allowing you to record.

And then there are the drones—not hobby drones, but military-grade systems. The Post writes,

Drones are an increasingly ubiquitous part of federal law enforcement agencies’ field operations, providing real-time aerial video back to a base. One compact model purchased by ICE, the Skydio X10D, is advertised as being able to detect individuals from 7.5 miles away and identify them from 0.8 miles. Many models are equipped with night vision and thermal cameras.

“It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place.” George Orwell 1984.

The Tale of Two Cities opens with the famous, lines:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

And so it is today.

And today, darkness is winning.

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